Alain Tanner, JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000

I really like the Francophone Swiss director Alain Tanner, and I wish to see him recovered from his current oblivion. I originally saw some of his films in the 1970s, the only period when they were released in the US with English subtitles. They are long since out of circulation in the English-speaking world, but you can find some of them (even with subtitles) on youtube.

I just watched, for the first time in forty years, Tanner’s film JONAH WHO WILL BE 25 IN THE YEAR 2000; a film initially released in 1976, and co-written by Tanner with the British Marxist art critic and novelist John Berger. The film is about the aftermath of the failure of the political movements of the late 60s/early 70s; there’s an ensemble cast of men and women who are dealing with these failures in a variety of ways. You might say it is about forms of Western European subjectivity in the wake of massive disappointment, and about the ongoing negotiations between private lives and public hopes.

I was really curious to see how it would hold up after all this time — and the answer is, at least for me, that it holds up pretty well. It is certainly limited — we only see heterosexual white people of what might be called the educated working class. And the movie is filled with countercultural enthusiasms (from organic farming to Tantric sex) that today have none of the potentially radical charge they might have seemed to have then. But there is a certain feeling to the film, anticipatory with a certain degree of hope despite the bleakness of the present, that we would do well not to just cynically dismiss as would be nearly everyone’s first reaction today.

JONAH certainly will not be to everyone’s taste — I mean not even to the taste of many of my friends. You can say it is more than a bit sentimental, with an additional sentimentality that my mourning for the 1960s/70s brings to it. You can also note that it is sort of Godard-lite, playing metafictional games and employing Brechtian alienation effects — but comfortable in a way Godard himself never was. All in all, it can easily be said that the movie fails to be anywhere near as radical as it thinks itself to be; it certainly wears its humanist heart on its sleeve in a way that seems embarrassing in retrospect. I should note, for what it’s worth, that as early as 1983, Alain Badiou dismissed Tanner as a “petit-bourgeois” director, in whose films “personal moods, the sense of instability, and inner changes are erroneously placed at the heart of the movement of the times.” And Badiou is quite accurate in his evocation of what Tanner’s films are like, even if I value these modes, senses, and inner changes in a way Badiou evidently does not.

But for whatever good or bad reasons — and however much my feeling this way might merit Badiou’s contempt — I still find myself moved by Tanner’s vision. The movie’s title refers to a child born to one of the protagonist couples in the course of the film; the child is of course a source of hope, even in a time when we have suffered only defeat. The film ends with a scene showing the boy Jonah in 1980 (in the film’s future, but still far away from the new millennium toward which the film projects). Seeing this movie now, well past its expiration date, and noting how nothing the film yearned for has even remotely come to pass, the movie is something of a relic, in a strange way, as if it had projected a different post-1975 time line from the one that actually came to pass. And I treasure it for this. Today Jonah would be 41, and probably stuck in a soulless-yuppie job that he hated, but found impossible to escape.

It might be worth noting that Tanner and Berger are both still alive — Tanner is 86, and Berger is 89. I wonder what they would say about their film today.